Fiction vs History?

[Ghetta Life]

o j m manages to say in a very fine manner exactly what I've been trying to 
communicate with Otto.  And the bottom line that he reaches is my own bottom 
line:  not all readings are equal (and the cosmos is superior to our 
understanding of it).

BTW, your "paper" on Osbie and the counter-force was very nice, and right on 
target, IMHO.

Ghetta

>From: o j m <p-list at sardonic201.net>
>
>A few brief thoughts before I get back to grading this stack of (theory) 
>papers in front of me.
>
>Otto, your points are well taken, but I think you're missing a few aspects 
>of Ghetta's argument.  First, I do worry that he's right in suggesting that 
>perhaps the deconstructive technique can become dogmatic.  You've got to be 
>careful not to universalize deconstruction as a "technique."  If you do, 
>this is as ideologically blind as what deconstruction aims to critique.  
>Perhaps deconstruction is the first philosophy to fail precisely when it 
>begins to succeed--and fails because of the success.  *Ought* (there's a 
>word kids in my generation seldom use!) one to always employ 
>deconstruction?  Are there better techniques for certain kinds of problems 
>and questions?
>
>Second, Ghetta's point about "T"ruth being in the realm of God, wasn't 
>playing the God Card.  What he was getting at, I think, is a point I raised 
>a while ago: poststructuralists set up a strawman argument against 
>knowledge.  By positing that any error or ambiguity preclude knowledge or 
>objectivity, poststructuralists set up an account of truth, knowledge, and 
>objectivity that is 1) very easy to shoot down, and 2) an account of 
>knowledge that very few people, if anybody, within the philosophical 
>community would adhere to.  To reiterate a point made all ready: the world 
>cannot be reduced to a text.  There are indeed extralingual things, aspects 
>of this world that operate with or without our fancy words and theories.  
>The real challenge is to articulate a theory of meaning that accounts for 
>error, subjectivity, and imperfect knowledge and yet does not abandon ideas 
>such as truth or objectivity, a theory of meaning that can indeed draw a 
>conceptual line between fiction and history.
>
>Perhaps a good way to approach this is through the work of Edward Said.  
>While it is indeed the case, as Said argues, nobody is able to extract 
>their perspective from a social power construct, this does not mean that 
>there can be no such thing as history.  Indeed, what is the point of a body 
>of work like Said's--or, in a sense, Foucault's--except to point out a 
>wrong line of historical thinking?  Behind such a project is the implicit 
>assertion that they have a better notion of history--a version more true, 
>somehow.  While it may not be the case that we will ever have a final, 
>perfect history book (that is, a history book that moves from the gray area 
>into the clearly defined black or white area), I for one adamantly believe 
>there can be more and less accurate histories.  Who here would claim that a 
>history text that denies the Holocaust is more*right* than Shirer's The 
>Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or that official Soviet records denying 
>the gulags is more accurate than The Gulag Archipelago?  Of course a 
>historian is selective in choosing what to tell--the question is the 
>rightness of those selections, though, is it not?
>
>O.
>

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